


The Water Opens Wide

by surrealistloverboy



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Hannibal is a Cannibal, M/M, Post-Fall (Hannibal), gay cannibalism baby!!, the season 4 bryan fuller wont give us, will does acid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:56:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28503369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surrealistloverboy/pseuds/surrealistloverboy
Summary: post-fall nonsense
Relationships: Will Graham & Hannibal Lecter
Kudos: 7





	The Water Opens Wide

The fall lasts an eternity. 

Time slows as Will’s feet find their way clumsily over the cliff’s edge. His arms tighten around Hannibal and as one they pass the point of no return. Aside from the small, surprised noise Hannibal makes into the crook of Will’s neck, they fall in mutual deafening silence. 

The way time is stretching and distorting around him gives Will ample time to think. He calculates, to the best of his ability, exactly how they’ll hit the water; Hannibal first and then him. He’s no stranger to death. He’s seen this before, although not like this. Not from the side of the one dying. The impact will come like frigid cement, city streets blanketed by ice. That alone isn’t guaranteed to kill them both, of course, though he holds onto the hope that it might. Maybe then it’ll be quick and relatively painless. If not, it’ll at least make it harder to swim. Send them into shock. With the injuries they’ve already sustained and the fact that their arms are pinned together in an embrace, they’ll sink and be lost in the infinite darkness of the water. 

Drowning won’t take too long. A few minutes, maybe, and once the initial panic wears off your body stops hurting and you’re overcome by bliss. Struggling, breathing, living; all these things become a distant afterthought. A memory of a life dominated by an underlying survival instinct. You just sort of let yourself forget. Accept it. Of all the ways they could have died by now, of all the things they’ve put each other through, that doesn’t sound horribly unappealing; going numb and cold in each other’s arms, before being filled with a final warmth as it all finally ends. 

Oh, God. This is it, isn’t it. This is the end. At long last this prolonged, tortuous game is drawing to a close. And what better way to go than together? Can’t live with each other, can’t live without each other. The only logical solution is to die together. Each held tightly by the other, bodys pressed so close they may as well just be one, heartbeats hammering against one another. Straining, almost as if trying to escape their ribcages and fuse together. Their final breaths will be exhaled through a shared set of lungs. Rigor mortis will lock their corpses together in an epic show of love that transcends death. They’ll be dragged deeper and deeper into the abyss by the current, never to be found. Not for a long time, at least. Their flesh will tear away gradually in silky, bloated strands. Small fish will nibble at their skin. Seagulls will make nests out of their clothes and hair as they wash ashore. Crabs will make their homes in hollow skulls. Their skeletons will be empty and cavernous, like ancient shipwrecks. Seaweed and coral will decorate their bones, making them into something beautiful. A work of art sculpted by whatever god calls the sea its home. They’ll be swallowed and digested and made pure.

A fitting end. 

Will buries his head in Hannibal’s chest, absorbing his fleeting warmth as the wind roars past his ears, snatching the air from him. His hair whips violently across his face. His eyes are screwed shut and he desperately wishes that he could look into Hannibal’s eyes as they both go. Wishes that his face could be the last thing he sees as opposed to darkness. Wishes Hannibal could just see him, understand why there was no other choice. Wishes, distantly, sadistically, that he could see the life leave Hannibal’s eyes so he could die in peace, knowing that he succeeded. But he can’t. They’re moving too fast and the water is eagerly rearing up to meet them and Will doesn’t want to pull away, doesn’t want to remove his head from the other man’s chest, just wants it to be over.

This is my design.

They hit the water. Hard. Harder than he’d anticipated. The wind is knocked instantly out of him with a harsh grunt. It always hurts so much less in theory, in abstract. He draws in a sharp gasp, an involuntary function propelled by his feeble human instinct to survive. His grip on Hannibal falters for a brief moment. A moment is all he needs, and just like that his entire plan unravels. Once again, Hannibal is in control. He grabs fistfuls of Hannibal’s shirt, trying to drag him beneath the waves with him, knowing that once they're there they can stay there, they can die. The next few moments is a rapid flurry of bubbles and sharp movements and clawing hands. A desperate, floundering dance of death. The other man is struggling against him for his life, tearing himself away harshly, depriving him. His limbs are so cold. Numbness blossoms at his fingertips and sears up his arms, locking them in place. His legs are leaden weights. Movement becomes less and less possible. His eyes are still shut tight, and he finds himself sinking alone.

With a horrible ache he realises that this is how he will die. Incomplete. Seperated. His offering of a final truce rejected. With that thought he surrenders. He doesn’t bother drawing in a breath as his face disappears below the surface. He doesn’t bother treading water or flailing. He can’t anyway, even if he wanted to. This is wrong. This is all wrong. There’s a gaping emptiness swelling in the pit of his stomach, filling his chest, clogging up his throat. A big, slimy, cold thing unfurling within him, destroying him from the inside. His mind becomes foggy. He’s no longer aware of his wounds. Not in a way that matters. He can’t tell which way is up and which is down, any semblance of reality fading away as the world becomes a black hole. He can’t see anything. So, alone and infinitesimal he drifts, deeper, deeper, into the vast expanse. Surrenders himself to it. Revels in it. 

The water opens wide and swallows him whole. 

***

Will starts awake in bed with a harsh sob. His hand shoots up to cover his mouth, a strangled whimper escaping his lips before he’s aware of his surroundings. He takes a deep, shuddering breath in. Bed. A breath out. Dry land. In. He’s alive. Out. He’s OK. The clammy hand over his mouth drops to his lap, absently clutching the sheets. His skin is damp with sweat, the wetness a morbid homage to his nightmare of drowning. To the memories. With trembling fingers he reaches for his glasses on the nightstand. He fumbles in the dark for a second but eventually finds them and puts them on. They lay crooked across his face. It takes a moment for him to fully gain his bearings; his nightmares have always left him disoriented but recently the feeling seems to have gotten much worse. There’s not much to be done about that, but to wait and hope for it to get better. 

The digital alarm clock declares that it’s 3:35 in blinking red numerals. Great. He doesn’t remember what time he actually drifted off; Most nights he just lays in bed, thinking, until sleep finally takes him into its arms. Bolting awake in the young hours of the morning is fairly commonplace for him these days. He rarely wakes feeling well rested, as if the little sleep he does get drains his energy. He sighs before swinging his legs over the side of the bed and standing up. He’s wearing a (now sweat-soaked) T-shirt and a plain pair of boxers. The air is chilly against his legs, but he doesn’t mind it too much. The sensation grounds him somewhat. Reminds him that this is real. That he’s not dying. His throat is parched from screaming in his sleep and he figures he won’t have much luck going to bed again at the moment. 

It has been almost two weeks since the fall. Something like that. He doesn’t care enough to keep up, really. It feels like it should be longer than that. It feels like a lifetime since the ocean chewed them up and spat them out. Since they dragged their wretched bodies ashore to lick their wounds. Shivering and heaving and black with moonlit blood. Saltwater and bile dribbling from their lips. They’d never been more pathetic than they were in those hours, more akin to twitching roadkill than men. Somewhere between life and death, teetering vulnerably on the edge. Animals that would be better off being put down. The stars were their only witness, millions of eyes blinking, judging, muttering bitterly amongst themselves. Look at this sorry pair, they were saying. Like Icarus they flew too close to the sun and now they’re burning, burning, burning. 

One might call it divine intervention; the heavens could see what they were becoming and had to strike them down. An act of cowardice. An act of fear. Crushing them underfoot before they became infinite, as they were destined to be. But it was too late; now they laughed in the face of the divine. Spat in its eyes. Dared it to just try and stop them again. In these moments, washed ashore, bodies all but given out, they were God. They were one. They were everything. 

Bedelia had asked, once, if he ached for Hannibal. As they lay on the beach, bleeding and fighting for consciousness and screaming deliriously at the sky, he realised just how much he had ached. Just how much he had yearned for this. They didn’t die that night. Anyone else would have; The fall, the injuries, the churning waves. No, it wasn’t a coincidence that they survived. That night was never supposed to be the end. It was the beginning. 

Perhaps it feels like a lifetime ago because it was; For all intents and purposes Will Graham died that night. His skull was dashed against the rocks, or he bled out from the aftermath of the Dragon’s attack, or his lungs filled with seawater, or his pet cannibal had decided he was no longer of use to him. Whatever happened, he’s dead. At least that’s what the FBI thinks. Or, that’s what they want him to think they think. Of course he’s seen the TattleCrime headlines. The speculation, the obvious, petulant taunting. He knows all the tricks, all the little jabs Freddie Lounds will use to reel him in. He knows because he’s been behind that screen. He used to be the one glancing over the journalist’s shoulder, telling her exactly how to provoke the enemy. The one setting the lure. He wonders who’s looking over her shoulder now. 

As long as no bodies have been found, the FBI won’t accept their deaths. Well no, that’s not exactly true. Jack won’t accept their deaths. Alana won’t either. The journalists and conspiracy theorists sure as hell won’t. Eventually the greater public will have to move on and the law will declare them dead, lost to the sea for the sake of convenience more than anything. But people will always know. Deep down. After all, Hannibal has agency in the world. If he were truly dead, everyone would feel it. On an existential level, everyone would know the threat is gone. Even if they hadn’t known there was ever a threat in the first place. That’s simply the weight he holds. Will suspects this game of cat and mouse won’t be over for quite some time. The question is what it will take for Jack to be satisfied. To finally leave them alone. 

He does feel it, though, a little. Like he really did die and was reborn. Obviously he didn’t die because here he is right now, living and breathing and… But, well, a part of him didn’t survive the fall. Not a physical part, he’s more or less intact, but something within him. Maybe it isn’t that he lost something but instead that he gained something. It;s impossible to tell what that is exactly. But it’s there. A kernel of… something. Lingering at the back of his mind. On a fundamental level he is different. Different to how he was a couple of weeks ago. Different to how he was when he and Hannibal killed Dolarhyde. The man who existed before the sea was gone. 

He died the moment he made the decision to go over the cliff. 

Will makes his way hazily to the kitchen, not bothering to turn the lights on. The dingy motel room is already lit by the glow of the streetlamps outside that leaks through the holes in the ratty, yellowed blinds. It’s a small and unassuming place, just a single bedroom and a small kitchen about the size of a walk-in closet. The only bathroom is a separate, communal sort of deal, down the hall from the room. It’s a little inconvenient at times, but he’s not complaining. At least he has a roof over his head for the time being. The room isn’t unlivable, but certainly isn’t the place anyone would want to stick around for very long. It has a specific smell to it, like mould and something sour and old cigarette smoke that had never quite cleared. The windows are permanently gummed half-shut, so the cold air and sounds of the city are a constant. The motel is in a pretty secluded part of town, so there isn’t much to worry about in the way of traffic. (Or being found). The only concerns, really, are the drunks that find their way into the seedy backstreets outside, or the scraps that sometimes break out between said drunks, or the occasional, distant wail of a siren.

The faucet makes an unpleasant hissing sound as Will fills a chipped glass with water. He runs a (no longer shaking but certainly weary) hand over his face and yawns. God, he’s tired. His bones are tired. He wonders absently if this is what old age feels like.

The water is lukewarm and vaguely metallic-tasting. He doesn’t finish the glass, instead leaving it on the countertop. As he heads back to the bedroom, Will catches his own gaze in the mirror that hangs on the wall. There’s a fake-vintage frame around it, made of cheap plastic. As if the motel owner had considered making some kind of effort at interior decoration, then laughed the thought off and grabbed the first mirror they found. Down the middle of the mirror is a crack that runs vertically, likely the result of it falling off the wall one too many times. Or just poor craftsmanship. 

He takes a moment to look at himself. His hair is a rat’s nest, partially due to restless sleep and partially because he hasn’t washed it in longer than he cares to admit. The bags under his eyes are much more pronounced than they used to be. The eyes themselves carry a distant, almost wild look to them. Down his cheek, perpendicular to the crack in the mirror, the stab wound is an angry red. It’s been stitched up, but there’s no doubt it’ll leave a nasty scar. Oddly, that thought doesn’t seem to worry him too much. Of course, it’ll make him easier to identify so he really ought to find a way to cover it, but he’s not awfully torn up over his face being forever marked by that night. Maybe it’s denial. Maybe he’s still in shock. He should probably be ashamed at the way he looks right now. Haggard and disfigured, exactly how you’d expect a wanted criminal to look. The monster that mothers tell their children about to frighten them into behaving. 

But he’s never recognised himself more than he does right now. He’s never been more unequivocally him. He touches the scar wistfully, wincing slightly at the pain, then steps away from the mirror. 

Eventually he crawls back into bed, setting his glasses back down on the nightstand. A wave of exhaustion falls over him as he rests his head on the pillow. It isn’t the sort of exhaustion that lends one to sleep. It’s more of a dull throbbing feeling. The kind that makes your eyes feel leaden in their sockets. No, he likely won’t sleep for some time. But his body is still weak and resting is better than nothing. He rolls over, glancing at the other figure in the bed. Still fast asleep, facing away. Breath coming deep and even. Peaceful. 

At least one of us is, He thinks.

Will lays awake for some time, staring at Hannibal’s back. Eventually, he sinks into a dreamless sleep.


End file.
